Thoughts on The Vanishing

    On Criterion, I watched the 1988 Dutch thriller The Vanishing, directed by George Sluizer, written by Tim Krabbé (based on his novel The Golden Egg) and starring Gene Bervoets, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, and Johanna ter Steege. I had heard of it in 2003 from Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments, where it had a slot on the list, and the scary moment it highlighted was the brutal ending of the film, so that already gave it away for me. And I've seen the 1993 American remake that Sluzier directed, starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jeff Bridges, and Sandra Bullock, which I thought was boring and dull, with a cop-out ending, and while I initially liked that Sutherland was the hero and Bridges the villain, both playing against type, they just ended up both being bad in their roles and would have been more fit cast in their usual types.

    The film focuses on a young couple, Rex and Saskia (Bervoets and ter Steege) on holiday in France, and Saskia goes missing at a rest stop while they are on their drive, and Rex is left wondering for the next three years what happened to her, affecting his relationship with his current girlfriend and driving himself mad with obsession over the unknown fate of his wife. All the while, Raymond (Donnadieu) is a mild-mannered French family man who is a blank sociopath, and had abducted Saskia all those years before, focused on devising the most evil act he could conjure to do. In his view, one can only be a truly good person if he is capable of doing something evil. He buys an isolated house, experiments with chloroform, and tries varying methods of getting solo young women into his car, with varied unsuccessful results. 

    Through the third act, Rex and Raymond eventually meet, and Raymond emotionally tortures Rex with having the secret to Saskia's disappearance and fate, and teases this to Rex, who had been desperately searching for her, which he ultimately scarified his relationship with his girlfriend for. The finale, even though I knew it was coming, was still rough and bleak to watch, and brilliantly foreshadowed in the beginning with Saskia describing a dream she had of being inside a golden egg (which was also the name of the production company in the credits).

    I thought this film was excellent and a great thriller that really had me absorbed in it, and the style of an abductor tormenting and antagonizing an investigator reminded me of later films like Insomnia, mostly filled with quiet dread than loud action. I'm glad I finally watched this, as part of the Criterion collection of Euro Thrillers.

Thoughts on Crimes of Passion

 On Criterion, I watched Ken Russell's 1984 flamboyant erotic thriller Crimes of Passion, starring Kathleen Turner, John Laughlin, and Anthony Perkins. I've never seen any of Ken Russell's films, but I know of his reputation for making bizarre British films full of sex and kinky erotica and bold colors and utter weirdness, like The Lair of the White Worm, The Devils, and Altered States. I checked this out for Kathleen Turner mostly, and she delivered, with her signature sultry deep voice, a commitment to the role as a woman living a double life, as a fashion designer by day and a sex worker by night, switching between her civilian life as Joanna Crane and her late night life as China Blue, in a platinum wig and blue dress. There, in the seedy sex district of town, she performs as various characters in a hotel, flashing with neon lights from outside, whether it be sodomizing a police officer with his own nightstick in a scene that feels more like a Hellraiser pain and pleasure kind of violence, or teasing the "reverend" Shayne (Anthony Perkins, seemingly having lots of fun playing a deviant psychotic) with his need to "save" her and calling her a whore and sinful. Shayne himself is clearly not a man of the cloth, but more so a hypocritical misogynist psycho who preaches the Bible and religious piety, but patronizes peep shows and sex workers, and sharpens a metallic vibrator dildo as a potential weapon.

    The film's plot in set in motion by Bobby Grady (John Laughlin), a middle class electronic store owner who moonlights doing surveillance work (and not subtly, given the large Super 8 camera he uses to spy right from his car window). He is approached by the owner of a fashion house suspects that his employee Joanna is selling their fashion designs to a competitor, and wants him to track her. She isn't committing treason, but Grady falls for her under her China Blue character, and as he and his wife (Annie Potts, underused in a dull role) are having martial issues and a lack of a sex life, he falls for Joanna, has one intense night of sex with her, and wants to know her as a person outside of her sex work persona, in a classic "save the sex worker" trope that some male clients may fall into under a deluded way of "rescuing" a woman from being a stripper or a prostitute. Joanna wants to keep her two lives separate from each other, prefers the mental compartmentalization of not confusing her sex work with intimate emotions or love, and is upset when Grady, and later Shayne, find out her real name and actual address and are each trying to take from her, exploiting her as a sexual woman for their own gain.

    I liked that the film largely centers Kathleen Turner's character as not a victim of her sex work, and makes her more of a well-rounded person, like a middle-class professional with a fancy nice apartment who happens to do sex work on the side and isn't ashamed of it, dressing in characters (with a seemingly large costume array, including a flight attendant uniform and a nun's habit), and that while she does have some morally gray feelings later on about her line of work, she is not depicted as a fallen woman, or a victim, and finds a way to rescue herself in the end instead of Grady being her hero. Turner just commanded this film, and she was at her peak of stardom, with Body Heat behind her, Romancing the Stone the same year, and Prizzi's Honor, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? coming up in the decade.

    I wasn't into John Laughlin's performance as Grady, I found him very bland. From reading the background on the film, he was chosen as a relative unknown, winning the role over Patrick Swayze and Alec Baldwin. And that Jeff Bridges even lowered his asking price, but they still couldn't afford him. I just found him boring and forgettable. A young Bruce Davison played one of his friends, and I could have imagined him more in the role of Grady as a better actor, albeit not as typically handsome as Laughlin was.

    Anthony Perkins seemed to be having a lot of fun, and relishing playing this religious zealot who was clearly a fraud, even overacting in some scenes in a self-conscious way. His scenes with Kathleen Turner were some of the best in the film because they both had a lot of charisma and star power and just dove headfirst into this bizarre 80s erotic neon thriller, with a synth score by Yes' Rick Wakeman.

    I liked this film a lot, though I don't think it was as weird as the Criterion description made it out to be. Sometimes I imagined it like a Brian DePalma film, but I think I was mixing it up with Body Double, which came out the same year and is also a flamboyant erotic thriller. This is fun to watch to see Kathleen Turner deliver a great performance and enjoy the neon sorta giallo vibe of it.

Thoughts on The Misfits

  

    Last year I watched a video by the film criticism YouTube page Be Kind Rewind looking at the 1961 John Huston film The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, and Eli Wallach. I hadn't seen the movie until last night, and I liked how Izzy (the creator behind Be Kind Rewind) discussed how the film was written by Arthur Miller, famed playwright and Marilyn Monroe's then-husband, and how Marilyn Monroe was torn between wanting to be taken more seriously as an actress, with training from The Actors Studio in her pocket, while still being pigeonholed into the breathy, sexy dumb blonde persona she would become immortalized by. 

    And that she thought that Miller would have her best interests at heart in crafting an intelligent character for her to play, but unlike the original novel version, the film version makes her character Roslyn feel more like her Marilyn persona, with the breathy voice and sex appeal. Like dressing Monroe in dresses without a bra to show off her bosom or the camera POV being of men looking at her behind. And changing backstory details, like Roslyn go from being formally educated in the book to being a high school dropout in the film, as if it would seem too unbelievable to viewers to see Marilyn Monroe as a college graduate. 

    It does feel unfair, because Marilyn Monroe was really good in the film, and adapted well to the naturalistic, Method style of acting, with small details like blowing hair out of her eyes or looking resigned and tired, or sounding more like an actual person than a sex doll persona. It's a shame that she didn't live much longer past 1962, because I felt like the 1960s era with more film adaptations of plays featuring Method actors would have suited her well, whether if she worked with Mike Nichols on a film version of a play, or worked with Nicholas Ray in a film noir. I liked how The Misfits' cast felt like a mix between the Old Hollywood screen stars (Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift) with the character actor types like Thelma Ritter and Eli Wallach, and Monroe is kind of caught in the middle as a glamorous 1950s star who was close with Actors' Studio founder Lee Strasberg and his daughter Susan, and straddling the line between Old and New Hollywood. 

    The plot of the film is that Monroe plays a woman named Roslyn, who comes to Reno, Nevada for a quickie divorce, planning to stay a few weeks until the divorce is finalized. She hangs out with a ragtag group like aging cowboy Clark Gable, mechanic Eli Wallach, and rodeo rider Montgomery Clift. She looks to them as an escape, only to find that none of these men truly respect her, and are wrapped up in the machismo of capturing wild horses to sell to be slaughtered into dog food, and they just see her as a sex object and a hysterical woman when she's angry. She frequently rebuffs Wallach's advances, and is patronized by Gable, being referred to as a "little lady." 

    It's a modern-day Western that just feels sad and melancholic to watch, it has this downbeat feeling of a bunch of people who seem lost, especially with the men trying to keep up this patriarchal culture that just beats them down instead. Capturing the horses with lassos just makes them look like greedy brutes, leading to Monroe's screaming rant in the desert about them being killers, saying they're not happy unless they kill something. While I'm not into how the scene is filmed (she's filmed from a far distance in the desert and can be nearly incoherent while screaming), I agreed that the men all felt like losers, and that she was much better off without them, and the finale did vindicate her feelings in a more triumphant way.

    I really liked this film, and I loved the black and white cinematography, the way Monroe was really working to prove she could act in a more naturalistic way, and how she came off more as an actual person with some tousled "messiness" (not so much, as this was still a Hollywood film and she was a gorgeous person). I liked how she and Ritter worked off of each other (they had both been in All About Eve, but no scenes together), I was preferring those early scenes to the rodeo scenes or the more masculine Western parts of the film, where I was losing some interest. While the film's production did have a lot of drama to it, I'm glad this was her finished last film to go out on, as her actual unfinished film, Something's Got to Give, just looked like a bad romantic comedy that ended up getting reworked into a different forgettable romcom. This was more of a standout Western that was more mature for its time, and a standout showcase for Marilyn Monroe's natural talent and charisma to shine through in a complex character.

Thoughts on The Goddess

Last night on Criterion I watched the 1958 film The Goddess, directed by John Cromwell and written by Paddy Chayefsky, starring Kim Stanley, Steven Hill, and Lloyd Bridges. It was part of Criterion’s Method Acting collection, and this film felt much more like a play, with theatrical acting from Actors Studio alums, Southern belle accents straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, long monologues, and a lot of drama about desperate people searching for something to belong to, someone to love them, but just being miserable alcoholics with mental issues instead.

Kim Stanley, more famous for being an acclaimed theater actress (she was in the 1954 cast of Bus Stop) plays this struggling woman whose mother abandoned her as an impoverished child because she didn’t want to be a mother, and feels her good looks and sexuality is the only thing that gets her attention, and uses it to not feel lonely. This leads her to rocky marriages with similarly troubled men, abandoning her own daughter with the same words verbatim as her mother said (“I’m only 26/19! My body is still young! I want to live and be free! I don’t want a child!”), and tossing them aside to become a movie star, using the casting couch to get ahead, and largely losing herself in alcoholism, forgettable men, and mental breakdowns.

A very young Patty Duke plays her as a child, and Steven Hill was excellent as her first husband, a somber guy with issues who resents his movie star father, and is a much more loving parent to their child than she ever could be. And I was surprised to see that Lloyd Bridges had more of an athletic build when he was young, playing a boxer, I associate him more as an old man regretting giving up sniffing glue in Airplane! or threatening to fight Jerry on Seinfeld.

I really liked this, a melodrama that felt more like a play, and seeing a little of what made Kim Stanley a legendary theater star.

Thoughts on The Watermelon Woman

    I hadn't posted in over a year. I still post my reviews to my Facebook page, but hadn't thought of my film blog in a long time, and figured I'd try to get back into the habit of posting my film reviews so my site doesn't feel dead.

    On Criterion, I watched Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, a movie I hadn't seen since I was a teenager in the 90s. When I was a teenager, I worked as a volunteer at the Cinema Arts Centre, an arthouse movie theater in Huntington, NY, and they had a VHS library of a lot of hard to find movies, and I was allowed to borrow them and sign it out. So I had heard of The Watermelon Woman through a review blurb in Bust Magazine, and watched it, and liked it a lot. I was a little naïve and young to understand all the parts about Black queer culture, but I got into the movie mixing a fake documentary with narrative scenes, where director Cheryl Dunye played a version of herself, working on a film project about an obscure Black actress of the 1930s, relegated to playing "mammy" roles onscreen but having a thrilling off-screen life as a queer Sapphic nightclub performer. The actress is fictional, but is a stand-in for many Black actresses of the time who weren't allowed to play more multidimensional characters in Hollywood films, or had limited exposure in Black cast films (called race films back then) that didn't get as much distribution as Hollywood films did. Dunye shows pictures of actual Black actresses of the time to pay tribute, like Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, and Dorothy Dandridge.

    So Cheryl works on researching for her film by going to the library, contacting film archives that have Black and/or queer film archives, interviewing people tangentially connected with the actress, and as an archivist, it did make me appreciate all the hard work that went into doing research for a project prior to having more expansive Internet searches, as the Internet back then was still in fan-run Geocities and Angelfire pages back then. Sites like the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive are valuable for finding lots of obscure knowledge on harder subjects, as well as watching Youtube uploads of films that can be hard to find through streaming or physical media.

    Cheryl works in a video store with her friend Tamara (Valarie Walker), and Tamara is more the outspoken, blunt friend, while Cheryl is more the shy nerd. Cheryl is courted by a flirty customer named Diana (Guinevere Turner, best-known for directing and starring in Go Fish and appearing in Kevin Smith films in cameos), and it's cool to see a snapshot of life in Philadelphia from a Black lesbian perspective, and seeing the parts of Philly pre-gentrification, like seeing Center City not looking as fancy and upscale as it does now, and the queer history of Philadelphia through the story of the fictional actress from the "interviewees." 

    It was a nice surprise to see the late writer and NPR contributor David Rakoff in a bit part as a nerdy librarian who Cheryl and Tamara are trying to ask about reference materials for Black film actresses, and he's just giving them the runaround. I have a book of his collected writings, and he did write about how he acted from time to time, switching between a couple of gay stereotypes onscreen, and briefly appeared on a soap opera for fun. He passed away in 2012 from Hodgkin's lymphoma in his late forties.

    I like how this film isn't so polished, with some stilted acting and dialogue, switching between video for the documentary parts and film for the narrative parts, the seemingly handwritten title cards, and just the whole creative DIY feel of the film. I'm happy it wasn't lost to time, and has become this queer classic in Black film, queer film, academic studies, and became a part of the Library of Congress' film registry in 2021. 

    Back then, I had followed Cheryl Dunye's career for awhile, hoping she'd become a big name director. I had watched Stranger Inside, a 2001 HBO TV movie about a young woman who, estranged from her mother, ends up in the same correctional facility that she is in, and is trying to connect with her, but her mother has chosen other female inmates as her surrogate daughters. It follows in the themes of Black queer women, and was an interesting movie to watch as a complicated relationship of a mother and daughter set in a prison. I also watched My Baby's Daddy, a 2004 comedy Dunye directed starring Eddie Griffin, Michael Imperioli, and Anthony Anderson as first-time fathers trying to juggle fatherhood and relationships with their girlfriends and figuring things out. It was decent, though I feel like the title and marketing made it seem sillier than it was, it was more of a relaxed comedy that didn't have goofy slapstick, it felt more realistic. Since then, she's been a college professor and has directed tons of TV episodes, including Lovecraft Country, The Umbrella Academy, Bridgerton, The 4400, and others. I'm happy she's been recognized in more recent years, and that her film is a classic that has been archived and digitized and has stood the test of time since its debut nearly 30 years ago.